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Berlin Writers' Workshop Reading

The Berlin Writers' Workshop and Lettrétage present a reading with Mark Mayer and May-Lan Tan to celebrate the release of "Aerialists", Mayer’s debut short-story collection.

Berlin Writers' Workshop was founded to build an open international writing community in the cultural capital of Europe. The heart of the community is the writing workshop, where students read and critique one another's work under the guidance of a professional writer.

About the authors:

Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 2012 to 2014, he lived at Cornell College’s Center for the Literary Arts as the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer. His first book, "Aerialists", won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and is now out from Bloomsbury USA.

May-Lan Tan’s story collection "Things to make and break" is published by Sceptre in the UK and by Emily Books/Coffee House Press in the US. Her stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Atlas Review, Arete and The Reader. She lives in Berlin.

About the book:

"Mark Mayer writes with a humorous, wistful elegance. His stories are singular, as detached and intimate as dreaming." - Marilynne Robinson

Welcome to the sublime circus of Mark Mayer's Michener-Copernicus-winning debut, Aerialists, a fiercely inventive collection of nine stories in which classic carnival characters become ordinary misfits seeking grandeur in a lonely world. Under the luminous tent of Mayer's prose, we see P.T. Barnum's caravan remade: A young misogynist finds a confidante in a cable-TV strongwoman. A realtor for the one percent invokes his inner murder clown. A skin-and-bones mathematician and his bearded wife plot revolution. A friendless peach farmer holds a funeral for a beloved elephant. And a model-train hobbyist prepares to throw his miniature world in the trash. The circus has always been a collection of American exaggerations-the bold, the beautiful, the freakish, the big. Aerialists finds these myths living in the everyday. Mayer's deftly drawn characters illuminate these small-scale spectaculars, and their attempted acts of daring and feats of strength are rendered with humor, generosity, and uncommon grace.